Control Towers: What Every Executive Needs To Know About

What Every Executive Needs to Know About Control Towers
What Every Executive Needs to Know About
Control Towers
in Supply Chain Management
Originally published in Supply & Demand Chain Executive and Supply Chain Brain
© 2019 One Network Enterprises. | www.onenetwork.com | v3.0
Adopting a Control Tower Strategy

… and how to ensure yours succeeds
Supply chain control towers can offer significant benefits to companies by extending
visibility and control beyond the enterprise, and enabling advanced analytics, real-time
collaboration, and sophisticated optimization. However, many control towers do not
reach their full potential as they are built on antiquated foundations. Let’s start with
what companies are hoping to achieve with a control tower.
In speaking to executives and business leaders, the most common reasons for deploying
a supply chain control tower are to:
• Make significant operating improvements

• Achieve the (seemingly) elusive end-to-end visibility for inbounds, outbounds,
transportation, orders, shipments, and inventories
• Become more agile, and respond better to customer needs, market changes and
incorporate technological innovations
• Improve on-time, in-full performance
• Realize cost reductions
While not unreasonable, most companies struggle to meet these objectives for reasons
such as rising costs and lack of control, etc. However, when digging a bit deeper, the
root of the problem often lies with current technology limitations, as, organizations are
struggling with issues such as multiple information sources and a lack of integration
across systems.
Each of these issues presents a huge problem, as organizations have a lot of supply
chain-related data, but much of it is duplicated and can be contradictory. This leads to a
lack of confidence in the information, because they have no single version of the truth.
Worse, there is no solid basis for making decisions and optimizing the supply chain.
Companies want to solve these problems and update their systems, but they don’t
believe it’s possible or practical. They know that they will still need to rely on many of
the systems and they don’t want to risk losing that functionality. Upgrading to new
systems is also perceived to be costly and slow. For many companies, the fear of change
management and the trauma of past upgrades holds them back.
Businesses limp along with aging and sub-optimal systems, and the result is they are
forced to manage the problems and supply chain disruptions outside of the systems.
Given this scenario, it’s no wonder that operations are often slow, labor-intensive (with
emails, phone calls, errors and error correction) and deliver poor performance.
The Pros and Cons of Supply Chain Control Towers

In response to these problems, many companies choose to implement a control tower
to provide greater visibility and some degree of control across the supply chain.
However, when they do, the results are often disappointing, as the concept of
enterprise control towers, while sounding great, have a false and inflated sense of value.
Why?
In a nutshell, it’s because their control tower strategy doesn’t encompass their entire
business network of suppliers, customers and transportation partners. In today’s
economy of globalized and outsourced business, an internal enterprise control tower
limited to an organization’s four walls will not work, because the control tower is only as
good as the foundation it rests on. Enterprise control towers built on loosely coupled
legacy systems introduce latency at the foundation. Much of the data in the supply
chain is still locked in silos, and once the data is accessible and shared, is usually stale
due to batch processing.
In this scenario, costs such as inventory in supply chain situations are pushed out to the
weaker members of the value chain even though your business ends up paying for it
indirectly anyway. This is why many control tower implementations, while good in
theory, lead to disappointing or mediocre results.
Beyond the Enterprise: Network-Based Control Towers

As organizations seek to achieve even greater results, they have learned that control
towers need to be able to deliver real-time data and be connected to multiple-parties
using the same network. That way they have access to data from all parties and can
synthesize it into a single version of the truth. The real-time data generated provides
clear visibility, reliable decision-making and powerful optimization that considers all
relevant factors in the supply chain.
With that foundation, these new network control towers provide powerful benefits such
as:
• Visibility beyond four walls, connecting the trading partners, and providing that
“elusive real-time visibility” that every business leader needs and wishes to have.
• Agility to respond to changing business needs or objectives.
• Rapid on-boarding and activation of partners on the network, thus creating the
ecosystem and generating the value from day one.
And it gets better. All too often, control towers are misunderstood as advanced
“visualizations and ad-hoc reporting” solutions which is not true. While that is a part of
their function, it is only the beginning.
Network control towers are capable of much more. For instance, we have seen the
biggest gains from predictive analytics coupled with autonomous agents that detect
issues early and solve logistics and transportation issues before they become major and
costly problems. But to be able to use autonomous agents, you need to be able to
represent insight across the total network, not just the operations within your four
walls.
A network-based control tower transcends the walls that contain enterprise control
towers and limit their results. A network control tower is more than a reporting
dashboard, in that it spans enterprises and systems while covering supply, demand,
inventory and logistics functions. It is “network informed,” and able to optimize and
execute while considering all variables and all constraints.
These modern networks also eliminate static, stale data and assumptions, instead
running on real-time execution data. They use actual, dynamically computed lead times,
not static assumptions as its autonomous agents use real-time transactional states to
identify and fix issues as soon as they emerge.
Network-based control towers not only offer improved performance based on real-time,
network-wide data, they are also easier and cheaper to deploy. They do not use
complicated point-to-point connections like typical control towers, but exploit pre-
existing network connections. Thus, companies can implement faster while realizing
more value from the comprehensive visibility, optimization and collaboration that a
network-based control tower provides.
In sum, a network control tower is a collaborative platform that engages your trading
partners in decision making for better decisions, better optimization, better team work,
and ultimately better results.
This article was originally published in Supply Chain Brain.
Raising the Bar for All

How network control towers create value
throughout the supply chain
Supply chain control towers have been around for a few years now, and enthusiasm for
them remains high. In large part, because they deliver enormous value, and also
because they are an ambitious and challenging undertaking not easily achieved in
today’s supply chains. This means that when enterprises successfully implement a
control tower strategy to be comes an important differentiator in their market, and an
important source of value to the business.
What is a Control Tower?

A control tower was originally conceived as a “war room,” a physical location that
brought together analysts along with data from multiple systems and trading partners.
This provided visibility to the supply chain and a reliable and accurate source of data for
making supply chain decisions. However, as the cloud has gained traction, control
towers are increasingly cloud-based, virtual dashboards of consolidated data from
across the supply chain.
Despite the interest and investment in control towers, complete visibility remains
elusive for many companies. In a recent survey by Geodis of hundreds of executives,
“visibility” ranked as the third most important challenge. Surprisingly, only 6 percent of
those executives could claim to have achieved full end-to-end visibility, and most (62
percent) only had visibility to their immediate trading partners.
This creates a huge problem because, without visibility to the complete supply network,
you can’t plan or make supply chain decisions effectively. Imagine trying to play a game
of chess when you can only see a quarter of the board. When there is ongoing systemic
failure it’s time to re-assess the assumptions underlying the approach.
Typically, control towers are built on loosely coupled legacy systems with point-to-point
connections to key trading partners. Since these integrations are difficult to implement
and maintain, they are often established with only a few important and immediate
trading partners.
Due to the significant effort involved, few connections are established. As a result, these
enterprise control towers face an uphill battle. With periodic batch transfers of data
between partners, visibility is “rearview” rather than real time, and thus of limited
value. By the time you become aware of a problem, it is often too late to do much about
it, as the window has closed on the cost-effective options.
At root, the problem is that these control towers try to connect on a partner-by-partner
basis. This limits their ability to achieve the comprehensive view of the supply chain that
a control tower aspires to deliver. It also means that trading partners, e.g. suppliers,
have to integrate or join multiple systems or portals, one for each customer they work
with. They are effectively a second class “citizen” in the control tower hierarchy,
contributing but not getting the value of the “hub” customer who controls the control
tower.
The Importance of a Network-based Approach in Control Towers

A far more effective and successful method is to connect all trading partners to a
common, real-time platform where partners connect once and share data over the
network with all parties. After all, to achieve the greatest business value from a control
tower strategy, an enterprise needs supply chain visibility across its full business
network – suppliers, customers, and transportation partners – and every shipment in
close-to real time.
A common platform can deliver on the elusive goal of end-to-end visibility simply and
elegantly, and opens the door to other powerful applications, such as multiparty and
integrated planning and execution apps; real time collaboration tools; and network-
aware intelligent agents that can sense and respond to issues across the entire network.
What is required to bring an advanced network control tower to fruition? Here are some
key elements that underlie an effective control tower:
Multiparty Master Data Management (MDM)–A key inhibiter of business
efficiency is the quality of the data driving business decisions. A control tower
cannot function effectively without consistent data across systems and parties. A
control tower needs Multiparty MDM to cleanse and map data to harmonize it
within and across enterprises, providing a clear and consistent definition of
product items, sites, customers and more.
Permissibility Framework– With potentially tens of thousands of companies on
a single network, ensuring each company’s confidentiality and security is
paramount. A strong permissibility framework enforces granular permissions, so
that network participants only have access to the information relevant to their
particular role and business.
Network Intelligent Agent Technology – Companies and multiparty networks
generate huge amounts of data making it is impossible to analyze the data
manually, glean insights, and act on all of it. Here, artificial intelligence is
invaluable. In particular, intelligent agents can be used to continuously monitor
and optimize the supply chain and modify and generate transactions in real-time
across the multiparty, multitier network. Network optimization is much more
powerful as it considers all conditions and constraints across the network rather
than sub-optimizing around a few nodes and/or making a decision based on
inadequate data.
Open-Ended – A control tower should recognize the past while embracing the
future. Many legacy systems are good at what they do and offer significant
value. Replacing them is often costly and disruptive to the business processes
supported by the legacy systems. In such cases, a control tower needs to
integrate, synchronize and orchestrate the legacy systems. At the same time,
technology is advancing rapidly, as we can see from the rapid rise of IoT, artificial
intelligence and blockchain. As such, a control tower must be forward-looking
and adaptable to incorporate new technologies quickly and easily. Blockchain is
promising to improve visibility, transparency, trust, and security. A control tower
needs to work seamlessly with blockchain networks and other technologies such
as voice, as they emerge and reach maturity.
Value Ramp – Implementing a control tower should not be a “big bang”
proposition. There should be a smooth onramp to maximum value. Companies
should be able to start where they are and ramp up as value is gained with
proven return on investment. An agile, ROI-driven implementation method is an
effect way to ensure the project stays focused on delivering enduring and
maximum business value.
In Summary
A network-based control tower on common platform provides a nerve center that
extends visibility and control across the network. It eliminates blind spots, and greatly
reduces risk and enhances compliance by bringing the full supply network under
scrutiny. It can also coordinate systems and processes, analyze and course correct to
keep your supply chain running smoothly. Further, and when problems arise that are
outside the ability of agents to resolve, supply chain managers can collaborate with their
partners across the network to resolve problems quickly and at the lowest cost.
We have come a long way from the idea of a control tower as a “war room,” a cloistered
haven for the chosen few to analyze and plot. On the contrary, when built on a solid
real-time network foundation, a control tower can be so much more. It can be a
platform for total visibility and collaborative planning and execution across all trading
partners. It can run network-aware solutions and intelligent agents that see the whole
“chessboard.” Every company can have its own control tower, without being
subordinate to the strongest trading partner. More importantly, these modern control
towers can power a new age of agile, intelligent, and super-efficient supply chains that
provide benefits to all involved.
This article was originally published by Supply & Demand Chain Executive
Nigel Duckworth is a senior strategist at One Network Enterprises,

provider of a AI-enabled business network platform that enables all
trading partners to manage, optimize and automate complex
business processes in real time. Contact Nigel at
nduckworth@onenetwork.com and follow him on Twitter at
https://twitter.com/duckworth_nigel
About One Network Enterprises
One Network is the intelligent business platform for autonomous

supply chain management. Powered by NEO, One Network’s machine
learning and intelligent agent technology, this multi-party digital
platform delivers rapid results at a fraction of the cost of legacy
solutions. The platform includes modular, adaptable industry solutions
for multi-party business that help companies lower costs, improve
service levels and run more efficiently, with less waste. One Network
also offers a PaaS solution and developer tools that allow organizations
to design, build and run multi-party applications. Leading global organizations have joined One
Network, helping to transform industries like Retail, Food Services, Consumer Goods,
Automotive, Health Care, Public Sector, Defense and Logistics. Headquartered in Dallas, One
Network also has offices in Japan, Europe, and India. For more information, please visit
www.onenetwork.com.
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What Every Executive Needs to Know About Control Towers

What Every Executive Needs to Know About

Adopting a Control Tower Strategy

• Make significant operating improvements

The Pros and Cons of Supply Chain Control Towers

Beyond the Enterprise: Network-Based Control Towers

Raising the Bar for All

What is a Control Tower?

The Importance of a Network-based Approach in Control Towers

Nigel Duckworth is a senior strategist at One Network Enterprises,

About One Network Enterprises

One Network is the intelligent business platform for autonomous

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